Who would have thought that sodomy-loving, latte-drinking Noo Yawk City would have been Ground Zero for what happens when government services are cut back to the bone, but apparently because the Sanitation Department lost a bunch of employees, streets weren’t getting snowplowed as quickly as usual (Exhibit A: Blogenfreude’s crazy pictures of West 30th Street yesterday).

The problem with streets not being plowed is that while the locals can strap on snow shoes or cross-country skis, it’s a bit of an issue for the sick, the pregnant, and the ambulances.

To wit:

Read more »

Preznit git bad review:

Decision Points flaunts its postmodernity by blurring the distinction between fiction and non-fiction. That is to say, the parts that are not outright lies – particularly the accounts of Hurricane Katrina and the lead-up to the Iraq War – are the sunnier halves of half-truths. The legions of amateur investigative journalists on the internet – as usual, doing the job the major media no longer perform – are busily compiling lists of those lies. Gerhard Schroeder has already stated that the passage in which he appears is completely false. And even Mother has weighed in. Interviewed recently on television, she said she never showed Junior that jar, but maybe ‘Paula’ did. (It was assumed we would know that Paula was the maid.)

Probably the first and last time I will see the names George W. Bush and Michel Foucault in the same piece.

‘Damn Right’, I Said [London Review of Books]

Maybe there’s a God after all:

If you plug your brand-new “Decision Points” audiobook into your Windows computer, you’ll get some pretty unexpected track titles. Why? Because in 2007, various artists made a protest album called “George W. Bush,” and the online database that Windows Media uses to fill in the track titles thinks your audiobook is their album.

There have been complaints of late — we’re guessing from someone who got a copy for Christmas — that chapter titles like “Innocent Children Die” and “Bush It” were popping up when they loaded the album on Windows Media Player.

Other replacement track titles include “The Mistake”, “Death of Democracy”, “The Weapon of Fear”, and “Iraqi Oil Production”. It might be the first time we’ve ever regretted using a Mac, since iTunes uses a different database for CD titles. Then again, we can’t think of a reason we’d ever permit “Decision Points” on our hard drive — we have a strict policy against malware.

Bush Audiobook Chapters Now Include “Bush It” For Windows Users [TPM]

Oklahoma protests its loss yesterday as the State Most Welcome to Secede:

Arthur Sedille was up-front with police: He would often put a gun to his wife’s head during fantasy sex play at their Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, home.

But Sedille said he didn’t know the gun was loaded when he pressed it to his wife’s head and pulled the handgun’s slide back during sex on the night of December 21.

Remember the first rule of sexual firearms, kids: Keep your booger-hook off the bang switch.

Oklahoma man says wife’s death was sex fantasy accident [CNN, via Dodgerblue]

“In the future, Lee is likely to attract a little more attention. In fact, he just might be the platonic ideal for the new Constitution-obsessed, Tea Party-infused GOP: a lawyer who knows how to muster constitutional arguments to justify extreme ideas — and do it with a surprisingly genial, rational disposition. If, going forward, the Tea Party movement wants a national leader who doesn’t scream crackpot, Mike Lee is likely to be the guy.” [TNR, via Political Wire]

“The other day, as we were musing around a conference table, someone asked a straight forward and seemingly naïve question: why don’t people read print newspapers as much as they once did?”
—INMA

• Inky fingers.
• Parade no longer dependable source of cutting-edge content.
• Publishers censored controversial Family Circus strips one too many times.

Read more »

This snowstorm is different, somehow – this is W 30th Street this afternoon and a buried cop car:

At 6:30 this evening I was amazed to see that 7th Avenue had yet to be plowed. The response is not so Bloomberg this time.
Read more »